Tag Archives: PC

The Tale of Garn Chapter 28

Warning: potential side quest spoilers ahead!

From Garn’s recollections:

The Collector

Returning to look for work in the Imperial City I learned of a man called Umbacano who apparently hired quite a lot of adventurers, explorers, and mercenaries into his employ. It took me little time to find out that he lived in a large house in the Talos Plaza District. I arranged a meeting with him.

After his butler lead me through the manor, past all manner of priceless artifacts and less-than-subtle hints at Umbacano’s wealth, I was greeted by a tall Altmer noble. Umbacano introduced himself as an avid collector of Alyeid artifacts and it was in that vein that my services could be of his use. He mentioned some Alyeid statues known as the Ten Ancestors which were once kept in the White Gold Tower but were scattered across Cyrodiil for safekeeping during the time of the rebellion against the Alyeids. He was willing to pay a generous sum to each of these 10 statues delivered to him. Of course, I was interested. I told Umbacano that I had already explored a few of the Alyeid ruins in the area and he was delighted when I presented him a copy of my landmark maps and notes that I had made for the cartographer in Bravil near the beginning of my journey. He ran over to a book shelf, took down various books, and began digging through them until we had a small list of ruins to start with. A new quest had begun!

“Actually, these ruins are pretty much fucking everywhere.”

Alyeid ruins dotted the Cyrodiil countryside but the majority of them that weren’t completely destroyed hadn’t been thoroughly pillaged and inhabited by bandits or monsters yet. These ruins are infamous amongst adventuring types for their great number and variety of still working traps and, worse yet, being home to terrible undead creatures. I’m not certain whether these undead are the lost spirits of the elves who used to live and work in these structures or if they’re merely the accursed guardians that were left to watch over these places when the Alyeids were being systematically driven out of the area. In any case, both the danger presented by these threats and the stories passed around about encounters with them have served to keep them relatively intact. In other words, while there was indeed a good chance of locating many of Umbacano’s artifacts it also wouldn’t be an easy task.

“A Jason and the Argonauts moment.”

Over the next month or so I traveled the region visiting over a dozen Alyeid ruins, seeking out the statues. Upon finding the first the others seemed to come more and more easily, like puzzle pieces falling into place. That’s not to say that my adventures were not fraught with danger. In fact I nearly met my end on several occasions. There were large, hard fought battles versus countless liches, ghouls, undead warriors, and other unworldly fiends. There were mazes and clever traps the likes of which I hadn’t yet seen. In the end, however, with Umbacano’s assistance researching, I was able to claim all 10 of the Ten Ancestors and collect quite a tidy sum in the process, never mind the countless spoils of investigating the ruins themselves.

Umbacano wasn’t done with me though. His next task for me was to acquire a carving that was said to be located in an Alyeid structure known as “The High Fane”. No doubt only a ruin remained, if anything, but he seemed quite intent on possessing this relic. He showed me an illustration of the carving from an old tome he had and gave me an old, rusted key that he said he believed would get me where I needed to go if I could locate the ruin.

“About to claim my first of the 10 Ancestors.”

With not much to go on, I started checking with patrons at the various taverns across the city when I eventually ran into an adventurer called Claude Maric. The Breton claimed himself also under the employ of Umbacano and invited me to have a drink with him at the Tiber Septim inn. After a few drinks and some casual conversation, in which I let as little information go as possible, Claude eventually brought up the High Fane and after little more nudging, let out that it was another name for the temple “Malada” along with some myths about it being the site great evil. This was lucky break – I had already found Malada whilst creating my map. It was far off, to the far East of Bravil, and quite secluded, but at least I knew where to start. I parted ways with Claude and prepared to set out.

After tying up my horse near the entrance of the ruin I caught a faint odor of smoke which seemed highly unusual for how far into the wilderness I was. Peaked by curiosity, I drew my sword and started heading for high ground from which I could look for the source of the smoke. Quite accidentally, almost tripping over them, I discovered two people, still sound asleep, at a small camp nearby. They looked like adventurers or even mercenaries. I thought this odd, but let them sleep. As I made my way back, more carefully surveying my surroundings than before, I spotted the silhouette of another man on a nearby hill. I casually approached him, sword sheathed.

“Do NPCs gain speechcraft skill for compliments? Hmm.”

The Khajiit seemed surprised to see someone else and, at first, plead ignorance, claiming to be part of a small hunting group who were camping in the area. The Khajiit was a poor liar, and besides the men were definitely not armed like simple hunters. I pressured him a bit more and he admitted that him and the others had arranged to meet another here in a few hours to attempt to clear the ruins of Malada. In exchange for a small bribe he offered to signal me when they arrived if I was planning on going in first – I accepted. Whether he would hold his end of the deal or not was another story.

“I came all this way for this fucking thing?”

The High Fane wasn’t too much more interesting than some of the Ayleid ruins I had visited recently, some traps, some undead creatures, and a small amount of abandoned treasure. I eventually discovered the room with Umbanaco’s carving. This area was sealed with a locking mechanism the likes of which I had never seen which inspired me to take extra time to look for signs of a trap around it. Thankfully the key I was given opened it without incident and I was able to pry the carving from its wall without too much difficulty.

“Party at Malada!”

As I emerged back into the now midday sunshine the situation got much less typical – I was greeted by my new friend Claude Maric, flanked by several armed men at each side. Claude demanded the carving, assuring me that it was only business. This, unfortunately for Claude, was not how I did business. When I outright refused to give up the relic Claude ordered his men to attack me. It was a close fight, having to fend off 3 separate attackers at once. When things were getting a little close for me I was surprised to have one of Claude’s men distracted away from me than none other than Khajiit I had talked to early. Unfortunately he was quickly slain as another mercenary joined the fight. Still, the distraction gave me the space and time I needed to use my magic to finish the fight.

“Is it hot in here or am I just being electrocuted?”

As I dusted myself off and turned around I caught Claude running off towards where the others had camped out earlier. I gave case and soon we too were engaged in a sword fight. Unfortunately for Claude he was much less of a fighter than his status as a treasure hunter might imply and he too soon lay dead at my feet. After searching the bodies and packing my loot I mounted up and began the long ride back to the Imperial City.

Counterfeit Xbox 360 Wireless Receiver Drivers

After playing around with Nintendo 64 emulators with the intention of taking screenshots for some N64 games that I plan to review one of these days, I determined that it was finally time to break down and get a new gamepad for my PC. None of my other pads had anything akin to analog sticks – I mostly bought them with playing much older games in mind. I’m a big fan of the Xbox 360 controller and since I already have a couple I figured it would be easiest (and probably most economical) to go the route of buying the Microsoft Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver which simply let you use your Xbox 360 controllers with your PC. Looking around I quickly discovered that these receivers were in shorter supply than they used to be, some places even charging quite a bit for them. Still, I ended up finding some eStores on Amazon that had them for fairly cheap and nabbed one.

When it finally arrived I immediately recognized it as a fake – not just some other brand, but a genuine, stereotypical Chinese counterfeit. The packaging didn’t quite look up to par – while at first glance it was reasonably similar to official looking packaging, the plastic blister pack wasn’t nearly as stylized as most Xbox 360 related packs, and perhaps even more telling, it wasn’t an immense fucking chore to get into. Also despite some okay use of Xbox 360 and Xbox Live logos and branding style there wasn’t a single sign of a Microsoft logo anywhere on the packaging – not a good sign as Microsoft LOVES to crap their corporate logo all over everything they make. The unit itself looked identical to the real thing save for the Microsoft logo on the front being replaced by an Xbox 360 logo and the little holographic seal sticker on the back saying “XBHD” instead of Microsoft. Other stickers on the unit and packaging looked a little off as well. Upon closer inspection it is even more suspicious – the connect button isn’t flush and is even a little offset, the rubber “foot” ring on the bottom isn’t seated perfectly and looks a little odd, and the piece of the housing where the cord goes in wasn’t seated properly. None of these were major issues, but an obvious departure from the high quality standards that you usually see in Microsoft hardware.

“Quite a departure from the real packaging but good at a glance.”

At first I was pissed about being duped by Amazon (who listed it as being a Microsoft product and having pictures of the genuine article) but the more I researched the more I discovered how common place these knockoff receivers actually are – they’ve been floating around for years now, presumably ever since Microsoft stopped supplying the real thing as readily. Most people have reported success with them. In fact, some people even preferred them to the genuine ones as apparently they don’t have the fuse issues the real ones have. If I complained and returned it by the time I paid return shipping and whatever “restocking” fee the eStore might have I’d probably be paying double what I paid and, I figured, if it works, I certainly didn’t pay much for it even if it is a fake. Still, I was highly skeptical – I figured though, if it were a true counterfeit and would work okay with the official Microsoft drivers I wouldn’t be putting myself in any danger by using it and, from what I read, despite some occasional difficulty in getting Windows 7 to recognize the device the official drivers worked fine with it. Still running Windows XP 32bit, I guessed I’d probably be fine.

I wasn’t about to try the software on the disk that came with it figuring that it would be some poorly written knockoff driver that would destabilize my machine, or worse yet be infected with malware (although upon further inspection the disk appeared to include the genuine Microsoft driver, albeit an older version.) I immediately grabbed the Microsoft package and went from there. Hours later, I finally got the fucking thing working. At first I couldn’t get Windows to recognize the device as being compatible with the driver, even after trying to force it to use it. Later I abandoned that version and went for the same one that was on the included disk, and although that one was recognized the driver installation would fail every time. I’ll save the gory details and get to the point – since my solution ended up being an amalgamation of various other tips rather than based on any one thing I read online, here is how I got my knockoff receiver working with Windows XP SP3:

Don’t plug it in yet – if you’ve already done so, go to your Device Manager, uninstall it, and unplug it. It depends on how far you got it, but it’ll likely show up as an “Unknown Device” with a black and yellow exclamation mark on it. It could also show up as a “USB Device” or possibly even as an “Xbox 360 Wireless Receiver for Windows”. Just look for the exclamation mark.

Download and install the latest official Microsoft Xbox 360 Wireless package: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/d/xbox-360-wireless-controller-for-windows
Download and extract this updated version of the device driver to someplace temporary: here
Plug the receiver in. Windows will detect it and attempt to install a driver for it. If yours behaves as mine did it will NOT automatically match up with the official package you installed in step 1. Otherwise, you got lucky and you’re done!
Choose the second option: “Install from a list or specific location (Advanced)”. Click Next.
Choose the second option: “Don’t search. I will choose the driver to install.” Click Next.
If it shows you a list of hardware categories click Next first. Click “Have Disk…” and find the “xusb21.inf” file that you extracted from the archive in step 2.
If for some reason it comes up asking for additional files, choose them from the same location where you found “xusb21.inf” in the last step, in the “x86” (or “x64” if you’re running 64bit Windows XP) folder below it.
If for some reason it asks for “WdfCoInstaller01005.dll” when “WdfCoInstaller01007.dll” is what you’ve got in “\x86” you can insert the included driver CD and find it there. It was in “\PC Driver\x86” on my disk. It did this to me though it was a result of my earlier attempts to get the original driver working.
It should copy the files and then be done. If you receive a “Fatal error during installation” error my solution didn’t work for you. Otherwise, click Finish and try syncing up your controller!

I hope that helps somebody out there. If the thought of dealing with shady Chinese hardware and old driver packages scares you I’d recommend trying to track down a wired Microsoft Xbox 360 controller (a Play and Charge kit for the wireless controller will NOT work) from a used game store and simply using that if you can find it for cheap, though they sell at Gamestop for about 3 times what I got my knockoff receiver for. *shrug*

Some sources:
The thread where I originally found the updated driver
A blog article troubleshooting similar problems under Windows 7 64bit

Update 9/2016:

Manace comments “It works on Windows 10 x64. You should first start a cmd.exe as administrator and type: “bcdedit.exe -set TESTSIGNING on” (without the quotes). Then reboot and you see in the down right corner “TESTMODE”. This means you can install unsigned drivers.

Now got to your device manager, select the unknown device, choose update driver, select the folder where you extracted the driver package and voila!”

You can also install unsigned drivers this way.

Frozen Fables

I know I’m amazingly late to the party with this one but I finally got around to playing (and beating) Fable 2 for Xbox 360! Between playing the original Xbox Fable at release and watching/hearing other friends of mine play through Fable 2 I was really, really looking forward to playing this one. Despite having a lot of fun with the game I somehow don’t really have a whole lot to say about it… perhaps I’ve waited a bit too long to write about it, but I’ll try to put down a few thoughts regardless.

Fable 2 absolutely oozes a style of its own: the odd designs brought to life by the colorful graphics, the unique (in gaming, certainly) 17th/18th century meets middle ages aesthetics, the funny voice acting, hilarious item descriptions, and all around healthy dose of humor injected into the world, and all of that brought together in what feels like a relatively well produced, high budget package. I was immediately hooked!

“Significantly less dangerous than he appears.”

The gameplay is pretty simple and very easy to get into and start having fun with – combat, for instance, is quite streamlined, just a button for each weapon type, and it is only much later, when you start improving your various skills, that the combat system begins to become gradually deeper. My main character was a mage and while I typically don’t play pure mages in these types of games the magic system felt a little odd and a bit limited. You can only have one of each spell rank equipped and you cast all 5 spells (there are 5 ranks) by holding the same button down for increasingly longer lengths of time. From poking around on the forums there seemed to be quite a lot of people confused about how to assign and cast your different spells. That said, once you figure it out it’s a breeze to use and quite effective. There were definitely a lot of other odd design decisions made with Fable 2, not just with magic. Knowing Peter Molyneux’s reputation for interesting, ambitious design I’m assuming that there were many, much more extreme ideas penned that were eventually dumbed-down or cut for various reasons. At the very least the game still succeeds in feeling fairly unique and doing so without too many negatives.

The two new features that got the most attention in the press, your canine companion and the sparkly golden breadcrumb traill, were both successes in my book. The dog was pretty neat and when he wasn’t around I felt myself actually feeling more alone in the world – I missed the little flea bag. I did somehow expect him to be a bit more effective in combat than he ended up being, but oh well. The bread crumb trail, which always points you to the next step in your active quest, only ever annoyed me when it wasn’t working correctly (I found myself occasionally outrunning it, which made me think it was trying to point me in the opposite direction, for instance) otherwise I found it to be quite useful and easy enough to ignore when I wanted to explore a bit.

“You’ll probably spend way too much time hitting on peasant ladies (and/or dudes.)”

I was pretty surprised at how quickly I progressed through the plot, figuring Fable 2 would have a pretty epic storyline after the backlash about how oddly quick the original Fable went. I agreed with those original assessments, by the way. To me it seems like many of the mechanics of Fable, and even more so Fable 2, particularly the character development and customization over time aspects, cater more towards longer and/or more open world game but I concede that perhaps my views simply don’t line up with the designers’ intent. That was another thing – I had gotten the distinct impression that Fable 2 was much more of an open world experience than Fable was, despite still maintaining a strong central story. Eh, not so much… definitely improved, but still lacking something in the way of a truly open feel. Regardless I dug playing through the story and customizing and progressing my character. Many of the side quests just didn’t feel that interesting and I had a hard time forcing myself to even be bothered with them though, I admit, this may be partially blamed on not playing many of them until after beating the main storyline.

Speaking of side quests, I did end up playing through the two DLC add-ons, Knothole Island and See The Future, which both provide you with some short side stories including a variety of additional quests. Both were easy enough to skip but recommended if you absolutely love the game and want a little more. Knothole Island was my favorite of the two, with its Zelda-esque series of quests into different temples/dungeons. It also got me my beloved dog back. 😉

All around, a fun game – I’m still a fan of the series and Fable 3 is definitely on my wish-list now. As an aside, I didn’t purposely go after many of them but some of the bizarre shit you have to do for achievements in that game was quite fun.

“Going down?'”

I played through the original Portal on PC again with the intention of refreshing myself before playing Portal 2. What’s to say? Still a fun game – especially given that you can breeze through the entire thing in just one or two sessions. Perhaps it is part of growing up and having less free time but I love shorter game experiences. It always amazes me that I managed to never get stuck for more than a minute or so my first time through. Knowing the way my dysfunctional mind operates I figured I’d bash my head against many of the puzzles – here’s hoping I have the same sort of luck with the sequel.

Finally, I recently picked up Frozen Synapse on PC. I’ve been hearing whispers about this game for what must be a couple of years now. They were offering a beta access for early buyers program similar to what Minecraft is doing but I decided to keep waiting out the formal release on Steam and that day has finally arrived.

The game is sort of reminiscent of the turn based, tactical combat found in games such as the original X-com and Jagged Alliance series, yet the mechanics give the whole thing a very different feel. Instead of being given a certain amount of time units, action points, or the like, you simply have to 5 seconds per turn and you can do whatever you have time to do in that window. It may be quite similar in principal but it is a little harder to know exactly what I have time to do and not do in Frozen Synapse without simply previewing my turn, though that is easy enough to do. In X-com everything you can do, from firing, to turning around, to moving, has a hard value associated it with it – such a thing likely exists in FS’s engine as well, but it’s just not presented that way.

“Actually winning for once…”

Speaking of presentation, the interface is also some what of a departure from that style of game, feeling more like the planning stages of the old PC Rainbow 6 games than a typical turned based tactical game. Turns are also simultaneous which is another big difference from most games like this. I don’t know that it really ups the challenge but it certainly does make turns a lot more suspenseful. A major plus to this is that it is setup to allow for asynchronous gaming – you can be playing multiple games as once, swapping back and forth when your turn is ready. You can play by email, continue a half-finished game the next day, whatever. It’s very cool.

One thing that kills me about FS (literally, it gets me killed) is difficulty judging my line of sight and, particularly, my enemy’s line of sight to me. In one of my first online matches half of my squad got obliterated by a rocket blast that somehow slipped through 4 or 5 tiny openings that, because of the perspective, didn’t even look passable to me. I’d love a tool to clearly show me LoS views. Whatever… live and learn! I’ve been doing a lot of learning lately – my online record is currently atrocious. Most of my loses were very, very close… but it’s not like anyone can see that when looking at my win/loss record. 🙁

Anyway, it’s a fun game. It’s different enough that it doesn’t really scratch my X-com itch in the way something like Silent Storm did, but for a relatively cheap indie game that has good online capabilities and an active player base, I feel like it has been worth my money and time so far.

As usual, Xbox 360 screens lifted from elsewhere. Fable 2 was a perfect example of a game where I couldn’t find much in the way of ACTUAL screen shots, showing the game as it looks when it is being played with interface and all – mostly only canned shots released by PR. 😕